Emma Forrest

10 Screenwriters to Watch

Don’t date Emma Forrest if you’re afraid to see yourself immortalized in her next script.

“I’m from the Nora Ephron school,” she confesses. “Everything is copy. Every guy I get involved with for five minutes knows I’m going to write about him.”

She wrote “Liars (A-E)” this spring in just three days following the breakup of her yearlong relationship with actor Colin Farrell. A couple of weeks later, the script was sold to Scott Rudin and Miramax. Richard Linklater is attached to direct, and shooting is slated for fall.

“It came like a fever dream. I was afraid to stop writing because I was so afraid to lose it,” she recounts.

Forrest has always been quick off the mark. Born and raised in London with an American mother (TV writer Judy Raines) and a British father, she landed a column for the London Times when she was only 15.

“It was supposed to be about my generation, but the problem is that I live with a melancholy for things I never experienced, so I would write about Leonard Cohen and pretend that’s what my friends were talking about,” she says.

She wrote her first novel, “Namedropper,” at the age of 18 and has since published three more.

She moved to New York at 20, and for the past couple of years she’s been living in Los Angeles. But her projects are getting made on both sides of the Pond.

Among them, “Know Your Rights,” inspired by another breakup, is in the works at Film4. And “Love Minus Zero,” an adaptation of Nikita Lalwani’s novel “Gifted,” is in development at BBC Films.